Who’s excited for Christmas cookie season? I sure am! If you need some inspiration so you can make the most of this delicious season, check out my 2025 holiday baking list!
Baking is one of the highlights of the Christmas season for me. I love Christmas baking so much! This year, though, I’m feeling a bit out of sorts. The holiday season snuck up on me a bit, and I’m playing catch-up to fit it all in. I want to do the baking that I love, but I don’t want it to send me over the edge. So, I’m streamlining things with my 2025 holiday baking list.
Before we get into what I’m baking this holiday season, let’s talk about why I’m baking. I basically bake for three reasons over the holidays.
Gifts
Home-baked treats are usually my signature gift for non-family members (and even some family members) at Christmas. What exactly I bake for gifts can change from year to year, but I always gift baked goods to people like my kids’ teachers, neighbors, the mailman, sanitations engineers, etc.
Events
Tis the season for parties! Whether you’re hosting or attending, it’s always a good idea to have baked goods on hand to contribute to the festivities!
Family goodies
If I’m going to go to all the effort of baking all these delicious holiday treats, I want to eat some of them! Having easy access to baked goods is a quintessential part of the holiday experience for me. We’ll worry about the calories in January!
If you need holiday baking inspiration this year, feel free to borrow from my 2025 holiday baking list. These are all proven winners, most of which I bake year after year. If you see something that piques your interest, give it a try! I’m providing all the recipes so you can easily replicate them. On your mark, get set, bake!
2025 Holiday Baking List
Cookies
When you think of holiday baking, you probably immediately think of cookies. And Christmas must include cookies!
Chocolate crinkle cookies
I’m starting off my 2025 holiday baking list with a bang – these chocolate crinkle cookies from Sally’s Baking Addiction might be my favorite Christmas cookies. But please don’t ask me to commit! So chocolatey, so crispy on the outside, so tender in the middle – these are perfect holiday treats!
These freeze well, so you can get started on them now.
Brown butter sugar cookies
The other cookie that is a non-negotiable entry on my 2025 holiday baking list is my husband’s favorite brown butter sugar cookie. I seriously have to hide these in my garage freezer so he doesn’t eat them all before I make cookie tins. The brown butter gives them incredible depth of flavor and the nonpareils give them a delightful little crunch. Add these to your 2025 holiday baking list pronto!
These freeze well, so there’s no need to wait to bake them until right before you need them.
Brown butter toffee chocolate chip cookies
I have a thing for brown butter, what can I say? If you’re looking to take your chocolate chip cookies and push them right over the edge into transcendence, brown the butter and add toffee chips! These brown butter toffee chocolate chip cookies taste like chocolate chip cookies so you’ll scratch that itch in the best way possible.
Bake them now and freeze them for all your holiday needs!
Andes Mint Chocolate Cookies
We have a new entry in the cookie category for my 2025 holiday baking list! I made these Andes mint chocolate cookies at some point over the last year and everyone in my house raved. Their reaction showed me that I had to include them on my holiday baking list this year. They’re chewy, minty, and chocolatey and oh, so delicious!
Freeze them, and freeze them fast before you eat them all!
Snickerdoodles
I don’t know why, but snickerdoodles just scream Christmas to me. I don’t usually make or eat them at any other time of the year. Maybe it’s the cinnamon? I usually make a classic version of snickerdoodles for my Christmas cookie tins, but this year I want to mix it up. You see, I found a recipe for brown butter snickerdoodles and that just can’t be bad. Bonus: this recipe doesn’t require that crusty old bottle of cream of tartar that’s been sitting in your cabinet for who knows how long.
This is another freezer-friendly one!
Turd cookies
Don’t let the name fool you, these are delicious. They just look a little suspect.
It’s not really Christmas for me until I make the turds. They’re rich and fudgy and just delectable. You just have to get over how they look. Because this is an old recipe pulled from my mom’s disaster of a recipe book, I can’t link them, so I’m sharing the recipe here.
But first, a few tips. Make sure you have a very sturdy wooden spoon for these. I’ve broken a flimsy wooden spoon or two in my years making these! Also, these don’t freeze well and they go stale fairly quickly, so you’ll want to make them no more than a day or two before you need them.
What you need
2 Tbsp melted butter
3 Cups semisweet chocolate chips
1 Cup flour
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 Cup chopped pecans
How to make them
Preheat your oven to 325°F.
Melt the chocolate chips with the butter in a heat-proof bowl in the microwave in 30 second increments, stirring after each cycle. The chocolate is melted when it just gets smooth – don’t burn the chocolate!
Mix the condensed milk, flour, and chopped nuts into the chocolate until combined. This makes an incredibly thick dough, so mixing these definitely counts as arm day!
Bake for 8-10 minutes. Do not let them get hard!
Cut-outs
Look, I am not the biggest fan of cut-out Christmas cookies, but my kids love to decorate them, so I make them every year. I use Sally’s Baking Addiction’s cut-out sugar cookies recipe and then whip up an easy glaze of powdered sugar and water that we dye with red and green gel food coloring. Then the kids go to town with all the sprinkles! This is a Christmas Eve tradition in my house. Thankfully, my mom will be with us on Christmas Eve this year. This is a tradition I’m happy to delegate to Marmi.
Cake
One of my favorite Christmas traditions is to bake (and eat!) Jesus’ birthday cake. Christmas is the celebration of Jesus’ birth after all, so he should have a cake!
My family always sang “Happy Birthday” to Jesus and ate his birthday cake on Christmas Eve. We now spend Christmas Eve with my husband’s family, who doesn’t have this tradition. I love this tradition so much that we’ve shifted it to Christmas Day, which we spend just as a nuclear family most years. It’s a way to make an old tradition work in a new way.
My mom always makes an applesauce cake for Jesus’ birthday and my aunt makes a strawberry cake every year. I like to mix it up and pick a different cake flavor every year. For my 2025 holiday baking list, we’ve settled on an eggnog cake! I can’t really drink eggnog, so this is a great way to have a little eggnog flavor on Christmas without making anyone sick.
Other treats
Sometimes I go crazy with other treats at the holidays, but I’m keeping it simple for my 2025 holiday baking list. I’m making just one other treat this year, but I’m sticking with my family’s classic.
Strawberry bread
I have such vivid memories of strawberry bread day from my childhood. My mom would get out the blender, and I knew what was in store for the day – strawberry bread! She made strawberry bread for everyone – neighbors, friends, coworkers. If you were in my mom’s life, you knew you were getting strawberry bread for Christmas. And because we all eventually turn into our mothers, here I am, making strawberry bread for everyone in my life at Christmas.
Of course I’m going to share the recipe. It’s a good one!
What you need
3 Cups flour
2 Cups white sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
4 eggs
1 ¼ Cups vegetable oil
1 16 oz bag frozen strawberries, thawed
Powdered sugar
How to make it
Preheat your oven to 350°F.
Grease loaf pans (makes 3 medium sized loafs).
Combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon in a large bowl.
Throw the thawed strawberries, eggs, and vegetable oil in the blender. Blend until smooth.
Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour the blender’s contents into the well. Fold until everything is all combined.
Bake loaves for approximately 1 hour until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.
When the bread is still warm, dust the top with powdered sugar.
Other posts
Need a little Christmas? Try some of these posts:
Are you ready to make your 2025 holiday baking list now? I’d love to know what’s going on it! Please share down below or over on Instagram @sarainseason!